Pataphysical Medicine Quotes

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years. ~ Stefan Molyneux

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive. ~ Louise Erdrich

According to energy medicine, we are all living history books. Our bodies contain our histories- every chapter, line and verse of every event and relationship in our lives. As our lives unfold, our biological health becomes a living, breathing biographical statement that conveys our strengths, weaknesses, hopes and fears. ~ Caroline Myss

Cats don't forget. Cats know when they are needed and loved. These two would be better medicine for Minnie than anything that came out of a pill bottle.
p. 284 ~ Leann Sweeney

The cost of research, development and testing of a new drug is vastly greater than the cost of each dose produced. How should we pay for new medicines? Innovators should be rewarded according to the impact of their medicine, and people should contribute to these rewards according to their ability to pay. ~ Thomas Pogge

The art is long, life is short, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, judgment difficult. ~ Hippocrates

I trained in medicine after pursuing an academic career in the humanities, mainly because of my interest in the relationship between mind and body, and between mind and brain. ~ Iain McGilchrist

Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems. ~ Karen Sullivan

The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Recent studies of mindfulness practices reveal that they can result in profound improvements in a range of physiological, mental, and interpersonal domains in our lives. Cardiac, endocrine, and immune functions are improved with mindfulness practices. Empathy, compassion, and interpersonal sensivity seem to be improved. People who come to develop the capacity to pay attention in the present moment without grasping on to their inevitable judgments also develop a deeper sense of well-being and what can be considered a form of mental coherence. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

A theory is like medicine or government: often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving and, on occasion, lethal. It needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I knew at university that medicine was just not for me. I saved many lives by not being a doctor! ~ Zubin Mehta

When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God.

Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks ~ H.L. Mencken

But who knew what would happen once he got to Canada? Canada with its pacifism and its socialized medicine! Canada with its millions of French speakers! It was like ... like ... like a foreign country! Father Mike might become a fugitive over there, living it up in Quebec. He might disappear into Saskatchewan and roam with the moose.
-Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003), P. 507 ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

In the Eucharist, priest and people together come to concelebrate. Here the ladder Jacob saw only as a dream becomes for us a reality, the medicine that cures our souls. ~ Arthur Middleton

If we become ill, modern medicine can work healing miracles. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

First do no harm. -Hippocrates
Second, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D. ~ Anne M. Lipton

But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money, because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can't get along without it. ~ John Lame Deer

16 I am the ritual and the sacrifice; I am true medicine and the mantram. I am the offering and the fire which consumes it, and the one to whom it is offered. 17 I am the father and mother of this universe, and its grandfather too; I am its entire support. I am the sum of all knowledge, the purifier, the syllable Om; I am the sacred scriptures, the Rig, Yajur, and Sama Vedas. 18 I am the goal of life, the Lord and support of all, the inner witness, the abode of all. I am the only refuge, the one true friend; I am the beginning, the staying, and the end of creation; I am the womb and the eternal seed. 19 I am heat; I give and withhold the rain. I am immortality and I am death; I am what is and what is not. ~ Bhagavad Gita

More probably, foolish preachers, by always telling you how much Christianity will help you and how good it is for society, have actually led you to forget that Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity ~ C.S. Lewis

Although the Chinese had used opium as a medicine, there was no widespread addiction before the British arrived. ~ Robert Trout

Could your medicine be a cell, not a pill? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body? Could your medicine be an environment? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

A grateful heart is a medicine to the soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The medicine-man, having given him the once-over, had ordered him to abstain from all alcoholic liquids, and in addition to tool down the hill to the Royal Pump-Room each morning at eight-thirty and imbibe twelve ounces of warm crescent saline and magnesia. It doesn't sound much, put that way, but I gather from contemporary accounts that it's practically equivalent to getting outside a couple of little old last year's eggs beaten up in sea-water. And the thought of Uncle George, who had oppressed me sorely in my childhood, sucking down that stuff and having to hop out of bed at eight-fifteen to do so was extremely grateful and comforting of a morning.
At four in the afternoon he would toddle down the hill again and repeat the process, and at night we would dine together and I would loll back in my chair, sipping my wine, and listen to him telling me what the stuff had tasted like. In many ways the ideal existence. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Medicine I know. you tell me what a pulsar is and I'll tell you whatever you need to know about the organ of Zucker-kandl.
Sulu made a polite scoffing noise and explained anyway, ... ~ Janet Kagan

Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn't winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I swear I've good morals. It's just that bad ones befriend me. I'm a friendly person, you know. But I will talk to them. Believe you me. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art. ~ Barry Commoner

I've worked with Morris Animal Foundation for more than 40 years now, and I'm so proud of all they've done to advance veterinary medicine for animals worldwide. ~ Betty White

Contemporary medical technology is not an advancement in medicine- it indicates the failure of Caucasian medical science and is a sign of ignorance. Technology cannot replace the human ability to diagnose disease by looking, touching and smelling to perform treatments without drugs. ~ Llaila Afrika

The M & M sees avoiding error as largely a matter of will - of staying sufficiently informed and alert to anticipate the myriad ways that things can go wrong and then trying to head off each potential problem before it happens. It isn't damnable that an error occurs, but there is some shame to it. In fact, the M & M's ethos can seem paradoxical. On the one hand, it reinforces the very American idea that error is intolerable. On the other hand, the very existence of the M & M, its place on the weekly schedule, amounts to an acknowledgement that mistakes are an inevitable part of medicine. ~ Atul Gawande

Substances that are injurious to the well are equally (or more so) injurious to the sick. ~ Herbert M. Shelton

I think Dr. Ben Carson is a unique political personality. He's what we call a conviction politician. He actually believes in what he says. Here's a fellow who had been a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins for over 30 years. Babies conjoined at the head, he is the one that did that. He's a superstar. Ben Carson steps away from medicine, looks at the political environment around him, and he is aghast at what he sees. ~ Daniel Henninger

Whether we fail or not, we shall not be kept from continuing our mission by those who claim it can't be done ... Indeed the whole of agricultural and livestock science and even human medicine, if sound, is merely the business of discovering certain natural patterns already in existence, putting together the various pieces and discovering their relationship to the whole universe; indeed such a process is science itself ~ Louis Bromfield

It's possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It's possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skilks, it actually detracts from civilian medicine be diverting resources, research, and personnel from medical practices more relevant and applicable to the general good. ~ Ann Jones